Traditional event mediation solution contains functionalities like collection of usage data from network elements, aggregation, conversion of data format to unified format, correlation, etc. This all has been ready for years and most likely will be used for years to come.
Traditionally event mediation solution has been evaluated based on following technical criteria: how many network element interfaces it can support, what are the data formats it can read and produce, what is the processing performance of the system, what kind of process management functionalities it provides etc.
Only very rarely event mediation solution has been evaluated from business point view: how much money it can save, how much new revenue it can create, what are the new business models it enables, what kind of value-added information it can produce for operators business processes (e.g. customer care, billing, fraud, statistics).
Actually, business point of view was not very interesting, as billing models were simple and stable, and the source of the billing data was always known. Usage information was used also for other than billing purposes but the purpose and content of usage data was well known and well defined.
Shortly said: traditional event mediation is based on well-known sources of usage data, standard data formats, static billing models and relatively simple processing requirements. The main purpose of event mediation has been to collect data from the network, convert it to business support system format and deliver it to selected destinations.
Traditional event mediation solutions typically have dedicated separate modules for functionalities like aggregation, correlation and duplicate checking. While this works well for standard scenarios, legacy architectures are very inflexible when new functional requirements (that the solution has not been designed for) have to be met. This typically leads to vast changes in existing solution or even complete re-implementation.
The same applicant's former patent publication WO 2004/095326 presents an over all mediation environment suitable also for real-time mediation.
In US 2003/0009443 there is presented an aggregation method for data to be filtered, classified and applied by logical functions without data-specific instructions. This publication teaches one kind of solution for aggregating records in traditional mediation architecture.